Deftly rendered portraits of two “poster Moms” of today.
A vivid, lightly fictionalized Motherhood 101 as two women, worlds apart, find common ground in facing the challenges of child-raising.
The two women—Anna, a noted photographer married to Eliot, a fellow academic; and Cerise, a single mother and high-school drop-out—neatly reflect current anxieties about parenting in this story that’s yet more about plight than plot. In graduate school, Anna had an abortion, and she’s still troubled—and has never told Eliot about it. Her daughter, Lucy, was an easy baby and a delight, and life was good. Then Eliot failed to get tenure and, now, they have to leave their farmhouse home and move to urban California. There, in an unfamiliar hospital, Anna gives birth to Ellen. The second birth is difficult. Ellen spends time in intensive care, and Anna, tired and depressed, later finds it hard to work at her photography. She’s also lonely, and the once easygoing Lucy is now nervous and troubled by nightmares, especially about a local little girl who has disappeared. Good day care is hard to find, too, and expensive. Cerise is even worse off; she got pregnant in high school, dropped out to raise daughter Melody, and has worked as a cleaning woman for a nursing home. She didn’t mind while Melody was young and still happy to spend her time with Mom. But now an adolescent, Melody is critical, has odd friends, is drinking and having sex. Cerise finds some consolation in an affair that produces baby Travis, but, though he’s adorable, she needs to work when her welfare payments end. Shortly after, Melody runs off with her friends, Travis dies in a fire, Cerise loses everything and must move into a shelter—in the same town where Anna now lives. The two meet when Anna is checking out day care for her daughters, and they’re briefly able to help each other move on.
Deftly rendered portraits of two “poster Moms” of today.Pub Date: April 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-7007-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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